How effective was the Evacuation?

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Introduction

Question 3 The government had planned to evacuate children as a group for a long time before the war because they had seen how bombing had developed in other wars from that time like the Spanish Civil War. Many children had been killed in big cities in Spain/China etc and the government didn't want this happening anywhere in Britain. They were especially worried about the Germans would probably focus on bombing it. Eve if they went after the main features like factories and docks etc, these were built so close to ordinary peoples houses that there would be many children still needing to be evacuated. Education did not start off as a success but soon mistakes started to appear in the system and it seemed to be a failure when children started returning to the city in a period where no bombs were dropped for 6 months which is now known as the 'phoney war' and also which children came home for Christmas 1939 and their parents decided not to send them back. ...read more.

Middle

However the biggest success was the way that evacuation saved the children from the bombing, and the mental torment that so many adults suffered in the citied when the Blitz eventually began in 1940 because caused such immense devastation in London. The thousands of evacuated children would have been added to the death toll, but evacuation saved them. The failure of evacuation were partly due to the speed at which evacuation was done because the government thought bombing would begin as soon as war was declared. This sometime led to evacuation trains being sent off the wrong type of evacuees on boar and children arriving at places expecting instead. Even if this didn't occur, all the arrangements for fostering the children were made locally and people often just picked the children they wanted leading to humiliating experience or the separation of brothers and sisters. Even if this wasn't done there generally wasn't much attempt to see if hosts were suitable so some children ended up with families of a totally different cultures of their own. ...read more.

Conclusion

In a way they owned up to this failure by raising the school leaving age to 15 at the end of the war to try to make up for the lost education. With evidence of both successes and failures for evacuation, the conclusion seems to be that overall evacuation was a success. Some children had a very bad time because they were sent to unsuitable foster parents but most were well treated and ha an interesting new expensive of a experience of a different life style which made them more independent and mature. They would probably have been even more traumatised if they had stayed in London during the Blitz and seen the horrific aftermath of nightly bombing and many of them wouldn't even have survived. Evacuation did what the government planned which was saving the live of the future generation and reassuring their parents so they could carry on jobs so this is why I would argue that evacuation was a success. ...read more.

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